Tag: obama

President Obama never mentioned Donald Trump’s name, but when he discussed the need for workers to stand together it was clear whose tactics he was talking about.

Obama said, “But we’re not where we need to be. All of us have more work to do. After all, if every economic issue is framed as a struggle between a hardworking white middle class and undeserving minorities, then workers of all shades will be left fighting for scraps while the wealthy withdraw further into their private enclaves. If we decline to invest in the children of immigrants, just because they don’t look like us, we diminish the prospects of our own children – because those brown kids will represent a larger share of America’s workforce. And our economy doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Last year, incomes rose for all races, all age groups, for men and for women.”

Workers of all ages, races, genders, and professions can’t allow themselves to be divided by the Trump tactics. Trump won the election by dividing workers. He made white workers in manufacturing, mining, and energy feel like they were fighting for their lives. Trump demonized Hispanics and African-Americans.

The only people that benefit from dividing workers are those who can keep wages down with division.

Instead of fretting over attracting white workers to their party, Democrats need to be talking to all workers. Trump does not have a pro-worker agenda. Trump’s agenda is pro-corporation, millionaire, and billionaire. Workers will only win if they stand together.

That sounds good, right? Especially after all it took to pull out of the Bush recession. During the month Bush left office, 818,000 Americans lost their jobs. Unemployment increased to 10 percent before President Obama’s stimulus programs started ratcheting it down to the current 4.9 percent. Now, wages are beginning to rise again. It seems like an event that Ronald Reagan might call morning in America. But not the current Republican nominee. Trump says, “This country is a hellhole, and we’re going down fast.”

To hoist America up out of that bogus hellhole, Trump proposes the same tired-and-untrue tax- and regulation-cutting formula that Bush did.The one that actually did drop the country into a hellhole – the Wall Street collapse, massive foreclosures and high unemployment.

Trump offered yet another tax plan last week – the third of his campaign. This one, just like Bush’s, lavishes tax cuts on the rich. He would hack the 35 percent business tax rate to 15 percent. He would eliminate the estate tax paid only by the nation’s richest 0.2 percent. So, basically, Trump would cut taxes for himself – a 10 billionaire.

In Trump’s previous tax plan, low-income people, those in the lowest taxbracket, would have paid 10 percent, but now Trump makes them pay more. They’ll have to cough up 12 percent.

At the same time, Trump said, he’d eliminate all that pesky government regulation that’s getting in the way of business doing whatever it wants. So, for example, he’d abolish that annoying regulator, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That’s the one that just fined Wells Fargo $100 million, part of a total of $185 million in penalties, for issuing credit cards and opening accounts without customers’ consent, sham accounts that customers learned about only after they started accumulating fees and damaging credit. Republicans like Trump have tried to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from the day Democrats created it.

By cutting taxes on the rich and letting businesses run roughshod over consumers, Trump claims he would create 25 million jobs over a decade. This is Reagan and Bush trickle-down economics. It worked great for the rich. They got richer and richer. It never worked for the rest. The rest always do better when there’s a Democrat in the White House, as there is now. The Census report issued last week showing progress on wages is testament to that. But there’s more. Far more.

Princeton economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson found in 2013 that since World War II, the economy performed significantly better under Democratic presidents, regardless of the measurement used. For example, Democratic presidents average 4.35 percent Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth. Under Republicans, it was 2.54 percent.

Economist Steven Stoft analyzed 72 years of jobs data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, during which Democrats controlled the White House for 36 years and Republicans for 36 years. He found that 58 million jobs were created under Democrats and 26 million under Republicans. That means Democratic presidents created more than twice as many jobs.

And here’s another noteworthy fact as Trump runs around claiming he’s going to bring manufacturing back, even though he manufactures his own signature suits and ties and shirts offshore in places like China and Mexico and Bangladesh: Democrats create manufacturing jobs; Republicans destroy them.

Bloomberg news service analyzed data from the past eight decades and found manufacturing jobs increased under each of the seven Democrats and decreased under the six Republican presidents.

Even as employment expanded, manufacturing jobs declined under Republican presidents. The largest losses occurred under Reagan and the two Bushes – an average of 9 percent.

Republicans are bad for jobs. They’re bad for manufacturing. They’re bad for the GDP in general. Trump’s 25 million job promise? Malarkey.

Americans should reject Trump’s Republican trickle-down promises that have done nothing for workers in the past but swipe their cash and flood it up in torrents to billionaires like Trump.

Americans who want a job, a raise, improved GDP, more American manufacturing, better health insurance – just improved security in general – should look to the Democrats. They’ve got a long track record of actually delivering on those promises.

Leo W. Gerard is president of the United Steelworkers union. President Barack Obama appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. Follow him on Twitter @USWBlogger.

The following is part of a speech that I think Hillary Clinton should deliver between now and November. Its purpose is to prevent a swing toward Trump by voters who find Clinton’s political correctness on the topic of Islam and jihadism a cause for concern, especially in the aftermath of any future terrorist attacks in the U.S. or Europe.

The following is part of a speech that I think Hillary Clinton should deliver between now and November. Its purpose is to prevent a swing toward Trump by voters who find Clinton’s political correctness on the topic of Islam and jihadism a cause for concern, especially in the aftermath of any future terrorist attacks in the U.S. or Europe.—SH

Today, I want to talk about one of the most important and divisive issues of our time—the link between the religion of Islam and terrorism. I want you to know how I view it and how I will think about it as President. I also want you to understand the difference between how I approach this topic and how my opponent in this presidential race does.

The underlying issue—and really the most important issue of this or any time—is human cooperation. What prevents it, and what makes it possible? In November, you will be electing a president, not an emperor of the world. The job of the president of the United States, even with all the power at her or his disposal, is to get people, both at home and abroad, to cooperate to solve a wide range of complex problems. Your job is to pick the person who seems most capable of doing that.

In the past, I’ve said that groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda have nothing to do with Islam. And President Obama has said the same. This way of speaking has been guided by the belief that if we said anything that could be spun as confirming the narrative of groups like ISIS—suggesting that the West is hostile to the religion of Islam, if only to its most radical strands—we would drive more Muslims into the arms of the jihadists and the theocrats,preventing the very cooperation we need to win a war of ideas against radical Islam. I now see this situation differently.I now believe that we have been selling most Muslims short. And I think we are all paying an unacceptable price for not speaking clearly about the link between specific religious ideas and the sectarian hatred that is dividing the Muslim world.

All of us, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, must oppose the specific ideas within the Islamic tradition that inspire groups like ISIS and the so-called “lone-wolf” attacks we’ve now seen in dozens of countries, as well as the social attitudes that are at odds with our fundamental values—values like human rights, and women’s rights, and gay rights, and freedom of speech. These values are non-negotiable.

But I want to be very clear about something: Bigotry against Muslims, or any other group of people, is unacceptable. It is contrary to the values that have made our society a beacon of freedom and tolerance for the rest of the world. It is also totally counterproductive from a security point of view. However, talking about the consequences of ideas is not bigotry. Muslims are people—and most of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims simply want to live in peace like the rest of us. Islam, however, is a set of ideas. And all ideas are fit to be discussed and criticized in the 21st century.

Every religious community must interpret its scripture and adjust its traditions to conform to the modern world. Western Christians used to murder people they believed were witches. They did this for centuries. It’s hard to exaggerate the depths of moral and intellectual confusion this history represents. But it is also true that we have largely outgrown such confusion in the West.The texts themselves haven’t changed. The Bible still suggests that witchcraft is real. It isn’t. And we now know that a belief in witches was the product of ancient ignorance and fear.Criticizing a belief in witchcraft, and noticing its connection to specific atrocities—atrocities that are still committed by certain groups of Christians in Africa—isn’t a form of bigotry against Christians. It’s the only basis for moral and political progress.

One thing is undeniable: Islam today is in desperate need of reform. We live in a world where little girls are shot in the head or have acid thrown in their faces for the crime of learning to read. We live in a world where a mere rumor that a book has been defaced can start riots in a dozen countries. We live in a world in which people reliably get murdered over cartoons, and blog posts, and beauty pageants—even the mere naming of a teddy bear. I’m now convinced that we have to talk about this with less hesitancy and more candor than we’ve shown in the past.Muslims everywhere who love freedom must honestly grapple with the challenges that a politicized strand of their religion poses to free societies.And we must support them in doing so. Otherwise, our silence will only further empower bigots and xenophobes. That is dangerous. We are already seeing the rise of the far right in Europe. And we are witnessing the coalescence of everything that’s still wrong with America in the candidacy of Donald Trump.

Now, it is true that this politicized strain of Islam is a source of much of the world’s chaos and intolerance at this moment. But it is also true that no one suffers more from this chaos and intolerance than Muslims themselves. Most victims of terrorism are Muslim; the women who are forced to wear burkhas or are murdered in so-called “honor killings” are Muslim; the men who are thrown from rooftops for being born gay are Muslim. Most of the people the world over who can’t even dream of speaking or writing freely are Muslim. And modern, reform-minded Muslims, most of all, want to uproot the causes of this needless misery and conflict.

In response to terrorist atrocities of the sort that we witnessed in Paris, Nice, and Orlando, we need to honestly acknowledge that we are fighting not generic terrorism but a global jihadist insurgency.The first line of defense against this evil is and always will be members of the Muslim community who refuse to put up with it. We need to empower them in every way we can. Only cooperation between Muslims and non-Muslims can solve these problems. If you are concerned about terrorism, if you are concerned about homeland security, if you are concerned about not fighting unnecessary wars and winning necessary ones, if you are concerned about human rights globally, in November you must elect a president who can get people in a hundred countries to cooperate to solve an extraordinarily difficult and polarizing problem—the spread of Islamic extremism. This is not a job that a president can do on Twitter.

I want to say a few words on the topics of immigration and the resettlement of refugees: The idea of keeping all Muslims out of the United States, which my opponent has been proposing for months, is both impractical and unwise. It’s one of those simple ideas—like building a wall and deporting 11 million undocumented workers—that doesn’t survive even a moment’s scrutiny. More important, if you think about this purely from the point of view of American security, you realize that we want Muslims in our society who are committed to our values. Muslims like Captain Humayun Khan, who died protecting his fellow American soldiers from a suicide bomber in Iraq. Or his father, Khizr Khan, who spoke so eloquently in defense of American values at the Democratic National Convention. Muslims who share our values are, and always will be, the best defense against Islamists and jihadists who do not.

That’s one reason why the United States is faring so much better than Europe is. We have done a much better job of integrating our Muslim community and honoring its religious life. Muslims in America are disproportionately productive and prosperous members of our society. They love this country—with good reason. Very few of them have any sympathy for the ideology of our enemies. We want secular, enlightened, liberal Muslims in America. They are as much a part of the fabric of this society as anyone else. And given the challenges we now face, they are an indispensable part.

Despite the counsel of fear you hear from my opponent, security isn’t our only concern. We also have an obligation to maintain our way of life and our core values, even in the face of threats. One of our values is to help people in need. And few people on earth are in greater need at this moment than those who are fleeing the cauldron of violence in Iraq and Syria—where, through no fault of their own, they have had to watch their societies be destroyed by sectarian hatred. Women and girls by the tens of thousands have been raped, in a systematic campaign of sexual violence and slavery. Parents have seen their children crucified. The suffering of these people is unimaginable, and we should help them—whether they are Yazidi, or Christian, or Muslim. But here is my pledge to you: No one will be brought into this country without proper screening. No one will be brought in who seems unlikely to embrace the values of freedom and tolerance that we hold dear. Is any screening process perfect? Of course not. But I can tell you that the only way to actually win the war on terror will be to empower the people who most need our help in the Muslim world.

The irony is that my opponent in this race, who imagines that he is talking tough about terrorism and ISIS and Islam, has done nothing but voice inflammatory and incoherent ideas that, if uttered by a U.S. president, would immediately make the world a more dangerous place. Being “politically incorrect” isn’t the same as being right, or informed, or even sane. It isn’t a substitute for actually caring about other people or about the consequences of one’s actions in the world. It isn’t a policy. And it isn’t a strategy for winning the war against jihadism, or a war of ideas against radical Islam…

Back when Donald Trump was winning primaries, Mark Halperin, the famously well-compensated political journalist at Bloomberg, went on TV and said Trump is a terrific politician.

“He is one of the two most talented presidential candidates any of us have covered,” Halperin opined. “He just is.”

Trump’s skill, he explained, exceedsBarack Obama’s because, unlike Trump, Obama “had David Axelrod and David Plouffe and a squadron of people around him who knew what they were doing.” Trump flies solo, ergo every supporter he counts, every stadium he packs, is somehow more rightfully his.

Halperin has also defended Trump from accusations of racismon the grounds that “Mexico isn’t a race,” and posed for this notorious picture, so unspoken affinities may be affecting his analysis. But to this day, as Trump is losing to Hillary Clinton in every poll, it is still commonly suggested that Trump has mysterious political powers. No matter what he says, his supporters love it! If he’s losing, it might be because he’s “deliberately trying to avoid winning.”

I would like to propose an alternate hypothesis: Donald Trump is bad at politics. He won the Republican primary because he is a bad politician, he is losing today because he is a bad politician, and part of what makes him a bad politician is only doing the kinds of things his supporters love, which can appear to be good politics to incurious journalists, but is actually not.

Case in point: On Wednesday night, Trump returned in characteristically Freudian fashion to Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News and announcedhe would forcibly remove not just immigrants, but citizens from the U.S. if they’re found to have extremist views. “Whether it’s racial profiling or politically correct, we better get smart,” he said.

Trump isn’t exactly winging it. Some Americans are scared, authoritarian, and racist. In a big country such as ours, there might even be millions and millions of them. Fear, authoritarianism, and racism are also strong sentiments, so it stands to reason that the people who exhibit them would be loyal Trump supporters, and unusually inclined to attend his rallies, where the themes are frequently fear, authority, and racism.

This appeal was sufficient to win Trump the primary not because he demonstrated raw talent, but because the Republican Party is broken to the point where demagoguery is a more valuable currency than governing experience, donor networks, “ground game” and other attributes. If Trump exhibited any talent at all, it was recognizing just how vulnerable the GOP was to being overtaken by its own Id.

When the primary was all over, Trump had an extremely loyal core of support. By dint of being the nominee of a major party, millions more reflexive or reluctant or low-information voters accreted around that core, leaving Trump with the support of perhaps 40 percent of likely voters, and nowhere to go but down.

Saying things like we should exile U.S. citizens will help Trump fill arenas, but it also underlines how, contra Halperin, Trump is an almost comically untalented politician.

Kicking citizens out of the United States for having extreme ideological views is unconstitutional. Not unconstitutional in the way that conservatives imagine the only policy regimes allowed under the Constitution are ones they like, but unconstitutional in a clearly delineated way.

This was, in essence, the point Khizr Khanwas making at the Democratic convention three weeks ago when he asked Trump, “Have you even read the United States Constitution?”

Trump’s decision to respond by attacking the Khan family was, in itself, open-shut evidence of his near total lack of political talent, but Trump and his surrogates justified his decision to defend himself on the grounds that Khan had attacked him unfairly—i.e. that it’s wrong to suggest Trump has never read the Constitution.

Based on a number of things Trump has said—including that the Constitution has (at least) twelve articles (it has seven)—Khan was on solid ground thinking maybe Trump never read the thing. But from the moment Khan’s speech captured the country’s imagination, and Trump responded as if he’d been slandered, that question—have you even read the Constitution?—made the metaphysic transformation from rhetorical to literal.Nearly a month has passed, and Trump has done nothing to address this glaring deficiency. He continues to propose unconstitutional ideas on a weekly basis, and it is a safe bet that when he and Clinton meet for their first debate next month, he will be confronted with some trivial question about the Constitution and have no clue how to answer.

Trump created this liability for himself over the course of a year, so sitting down and reading the Constitution—all 4,453 words of it, or less than a half hour of reading time—would only be the first step toward assuring skeptics and critics that he’s intent on safeguarding the country’s laws and traditions. But whether it’s because he’s irremediably lazy, or that he believes this kind of ignorance allows him to pander to scared, authoritarian racists without a filter, he is unwilling to do it. He would rather keep his crowds big and his polls bad. Even if it means allowing Hillary Clinton to shove him into a buzzsaw in front of a huge TV audience a few weeks from now.

This isn’t ultimately a question of instinct or strategy, because in a sense it’s both. But in a more important sense it doesn’t matter. Talented candidates will bridle their instincts long enough to ensure they’re making good strategic decisions that help them win elections. Donald Trump isn’t doing that, because he’s a bad politician. Most well-compensated journalists get that.

Sitting with me in the van to the airport on my way to Cleveland was a German family. Our driver turned the radio on, and a top-of-the-hour news update rehearsed the familiar litany of American woe. First, an excerpt from a somber speech by President Barack Obama discussing the latest episode of gun violence, this time in Baton Rouge. Next, a reply from Donald Trump, days away from receiving the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, who attacked the president on Twitter for turning the country into “a divided crime scene.” Rounding it out was an item about the Cleveland Police Department’s worry that demonstrators outside the Republican National Convention would take advantage of Ohio’s concealed carry law by arming themselves to the teeth. Listening in the back seat of the van to this recitation of carnage and absurdism, my thoughts drifted immediately to a friend of mine, the Washington correspondent for a major German daily, with whom I had been emailing earlier in the week. He could make a name for himself as a sort of reverse William Shirer, I would tell him, only half-jokingly, chronicling for a German readership the rise of fascism in America.

July 19, 2016, should go down in history as the date the Republican Party deservedly died—“political Jonestown” as the novelist Thomas Mallon called it earlier this month. For that was when the GOP finally nominated Donald Trump for president, officially sanctioning the idea that the fate of the free world ought to be entrusted to an aspiring authoritarian reality television show host. Mallon is an ingenious novelist of historical American political fiction, but I doubt even he could have dreamed up a scenario so bleak as the travesty that unfolded in Cleveland last week, one that, as an agitated observer of the Trump phenomenon, I felt compelled to witness from the floor of the Quicken Loans Arena, or “the Q,” as it is affectionately called.

My sojourn into the madness of Trumplandia began with a Monday noon foray to the “America First Unity Rally” held on the banks of the Cuyahoga River just a few blocks from the convention center. Organized by the conspiracy theory-spouting radio host Alex Jones (whose usual fare consists of claims like juice boxes are part of a government plot to make children gay or that the “chemtrails” from jetliners are elements of a giant mind-control experiment) and Nixon-era political operative Roger Stone, the event had the feel of a Guns ‘n Roses concert put on by the John Birch Society. Over the course of several hours, a motley cast of characters addressed a crowd of about 200 people, all united by grievance toward “the establishment,” a pathological hatred of Hillary Clinton, and an abiding belief that Donald Trump will single-handedly fix America’s problems. The mother of a man murdered by an illegal immigrant shared the heartbreaking story of her son’s death. A black Tea Party activist and perpetual congressional candidate from Maryland reassured the audience that Trump (“an outsider like myself”) is no racist, and closed out his pep talk with a put-down of the “disgusting, disgusted, and busted” presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Musical interludes were provided by a low-rent, right-wing Stevie Nicks lookalike and a 16-year-old Russian immigrant who sang her own song titled “Political Correctness.” John McCain’s Tea Party challenger in the Arizona Republican senate primary railed against a “global tuxedo club” of elitist overlords and declared herself ready and able to “mix the mortar to fix the border.” Offering muscle for the afternoon was “Bikers for Trump,” the leader of which boasted that “we’ve got guys all over the city” to “do whatever’s necessary” to keep the peace.

There exists a vast academic literature on the sociological composition of American voters (at the demonstration, graduate students from a nearby university passed out questionnaires to attendees as part of a research project on the attitudes and backgrounds of Trump supporters). Reams of articles have been written on Trump’s appeal to downscale whites, who appeared to compose the majority of people at the riverside rally (far from all Trump supporters are working class, however; the median income of his voters is $72,000). But there are elements of a candidate’s support base that are unmeasurable, common characteristics that no sociological study or series of polls can reveal. This is particularly true of Trump’s more high-profile backers and official surrogates. Indeed, the degree to which supporters of Donald Trump reflect the candidate in temperament, style, and even diction, across subgroups like gender, race, sexual orientation and class, is remarkable.

The Donald Trump for President campaign has become a fly-trap for seemingly every American dimestore huckster, grifter, scrounger, has-been and wannabe. The roll call of D-list celebrities and politicians who spoke at the convention, along with the raft of lesser-known opportunists and frauds who decided to become Trumpkins so as to get on TV, resembles a list of fictional characters from the collected works of Billy Joel. Scott Baio, Antonio Sabato Jr., and Robert Davi embody the distinctly bridge and tunnel, alpha-male thuggishness of Trump’s “celebrity” support. Scott Brown, whose political career crashed and burned years ago after a brief stint as senator from Massachusetts, enlisted himself with Trump in hopes of escaping life as a hawker of diet supplements, ironically the perfect preparation for a snake-oil dispensing presidential campaign. (Brown, unsurprisingly, brought along to the convention his aging local news anchor wife and daughter, a former contestant on American Idol and budding starlet.)

The porcine duo of Newt Gingrich and Dick Morris, both of whom waddled past me on the convention’s first day, are physical manifestations of what the Republican Party has become under Trump, whose fleshy jowls at times render him indistinguishable from a bullfrog. Unlike the fit and trim House Speaker Paul Ryan, a visibly reluctant Trump supporter who clearly would have rather spent the entirety of last week in a dentist’s chair, Gingrich and Morris are engorged, mercenary, and utterly lacking in self-control, as willing to stick whole plates of food down their gullets or reach for the nearest “beautiful piece of ass” (or prostitute’s toe) as they are ready to adapt their principles to the moment. Listen to Eric Trump talk about his father’s future cabinet and you get the gist of the intellectually hollow, wise-guy chutzpah that exists in place of a governing ideology or worldview for those who’ve chosen to degrade themselves by supporting Trump. “If we’re going to have the biggest deals in the world, which are trade deals, why not have the best guys negotiate this?” he told The Hill, as if taking a sip from his tall boy on the LIRR. “Why not have the Carl Icahns or the top guys of Wall Street? It’s why they’re worth millions and billions of dollars. It’s because they’re tough and they’re shrewd.”

Reflecting the outsider status of its sponsors Jones and Stone, the “America First” rally initially seemed to be a gathering of people too wacky to speak from the convention stage. But it became readily apparent Monday evening that the themes of this “shadow” convention would, in fact, be parroted by the ostensibly more respectable delegates inside the Q.

The night began with a benediction from Brooklyn priest Kieran Harrington, who, head bowed, made reference to “deliberations,” declared “we stand before you, contrite,” and asked the Lord to “bless those who endured torture,” sentiments completely at odds with those expressed by the man about to receive the crowd’s enthusiastic nomination for president. Following that uncharacteristically humble opening, the message of the evening proceeded as follows: Mexicans and Muslims want to rape and kill you. Relatives of people murdered by illegal immigrants joined people like Pat Smith, mother of a foreign service officer killed in the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack, in a festival of fear and loathing.

It would have been one thing if this shameless retailing of victimhood (something conservatives usually blame liberals for doing) was limited to tales of self-pity. What made it truly terrifying were the calls for blood. At the “America First” rally earlier in the day, I had seen dozens of people sporting “Hillary for Prison” T-shirts, what I took at the time to be nothing more than a token of Roger Stone’s virulent mischief. Inside the hall, I was appalled to hear, repeatedly and on every night of the convention, delegates cry “Lock her up!” whenever Clinton’s name was mentioned. It was an exhortation issued directly from the stage. Darryl Glenn, a senate candidate in Colorado, declared that Clinton should be outfitted in a “bright orange jumpsuit.” Pat Smith, who, in the exploitation of her grief the right has fashioned into its own Cindy Sheehan, insisted that the former secretary of state “deserves to be in stripes.”

The degeneration of the Republicans into banana Republicans reached its apotheosis on Wednesday evening, when Chris Christie, apparently worried that his reputation as a fat creep hadn’t yet taken hold within the minds of a majority of Americans, led the crowd in a call-and-response show trial-cum-lynch mob. Going through a laundry list of Hillary Clinton’s alleged crimes, the former federal prosecutor ended each accusation with the question, “Guilty or not guilty?” Most of Christie’s charge sheet consisted of political initiatives like the Russian reset and opening to Cuba, which, whatever their wisdom (and I, for what it’s worth, think they lacked it), had not the faintest whiff of criminality. But none of this mattered to the Jersey boy play-acting as Red Army hanging judge.

On the surface, the proliferation of anti-Hillary revenge fantasies smelled like the work of Paul Manafort. Trump’s roguishly handsome campaign manager spent years working as a consultant to former strongman president of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych, who in addition to stealing vast amounts of money from the public purse, was also famous for locking up his major political opponent. If Clinton weren’t imprisoned under a Trump regime, I cynically speculated, she might become the victim of dioxin poisoning, the fate that mysteriously befell Yanukovych’s other main rival.

But the single-minded obsession with throwing Clinton behind bars is an organic malady rather than a Manafortian import. It’s but one of many fixations that used to exist on the right-wing fringe but which the GOP decided to place front and center as part of its policy agenda. Last week’s convention saw an entire alternative media and political ecosystem (a potpourri of websites, podcasts, radio talk shows, and personalities like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter) take control of the party apparatus and dictate its own version of reality. Trump’s followers inhabit an America in which “SJWs” (social justice warriors) make life intolerable for white men, where unsuspecting individuals are forced to watch a feminist Ghostbustersmovie like Alex was subjected to audiovisual torture in A Clockwork Orange, and everyone must dodge a proliferating number of Mexican and Muslim rapists and murderers. When Uday and Qusay Trump ceremoniously announced the votes of the New York delegation, and the light board in the rafters flashed “OVER THE TOP!” it was more than just a literal description of Trump’s campaign.

***

With the ritualized incantations of approved slogans, resolute messaging from the dais and deification of the candidate, political party conventions are the closest America comes to the one-party state. In this respect, the Donald did not disappoint. A biographical video that was more “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” than “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” praised him for “dominating” the world of real estate and, now, politics. As an image flashed by of Trump in a ridiculously oversized top coat waving his hands at a crew of actors posing as hard-hatted construction workers, I was reminded of the parody website “Kim Jong Un Looking at Things,” which features photos of the North Korean dictator hectoring generals and inspecting random objects like an airport lounge table or processed food machinery.

With Trump, however, the authoritarian milieu extends beyond the mere aesthetic. It’s not unusual for a presidential candidate to showcase his attractive family. But never before has the nominee’s progeny played a more crucial role in a campaign, with the promise that they will play a crucial role in the future administration—the sort of dynastic nepotism one expects in a Third World country. I’ve lost track of the number of Trump supporters who cite his children as a chief reason for their support of the man; Maureen Reagan, Meghan McCain, and the five Romney boys never inspired such fawning.

Supporting Trump is an inherently masochistic act, and not only because one must surrender his conscience to do so. It is a form of intellectual and moral surrender. “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” Trump declared, in the most chilling and terrifying line of his acceptance speech. Trump’s tacit admission of corruption was paired with the implication that, if elected, he would be corrupt on behalf of the American people. This, I believe, is why the never-ending stream of stories attesting to his gross deceit and venality has done, and will do, nothing to dissuade his hypnotized supporters.Buddy Cianci, the tough guy former mayor of Providence, had a similar appeal, earning high approval ratings not in spite of, but because of his corruption: Citizens thought he was greasing the wheels to “get things done” for their city. A pair of political scientists even wrote a research paper on the phenomenon, titled “Popular Rogues.” But even if Trump could boast Cianci’s record of achievement in public office, which he can’t, his sins are far greater than those of the racketeering ex-mayor of the Renaissance City.

Overpromising is nothing new in politics, but Trump takes it to another level. He is a political alchemist whose followers longingly see him as a Rumpelstiltskin ready to spin their hay into gold. “Come January 17, all things will be possible again,” promised the alluring and attractive Ivanka Trump, sounding (and looking) nothing so much like one of those models in a television ad for a phone-sex line (and curiously choosing the date three days before the inauguration as that of America’s salvation). When Trump took the stage, his promises repeatedly brought the audience to its feet. “The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end,” he declared. “Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored.”

“I am going to turn our bad trade agreements into great ones.”

“I am not going to let companies move to other countries, firing their employees along the way, without consequences.”

“I’m going to make our country rich again.”

I, I, I. But nothing about how.

Hours before Trump’s address, Manafort tried to explain how his candidate would appeal to women. “They can’t afford their lives,” he told MSNBC. “Their husbands can’t afford paying the family bills.” A similar explanation has been offered for President Vladimir Putin’s popularity with Russian women, many of whom lack a father figure or reliable husbands, having lost them to the bottle. Trump’s repeated avowals of being a singularly transformative figure (“I alone”) make his predecessor’s prediction of lowered sea levels upon his own election look tame by comparison. A party that spent the past eight years lambasting Obama’s expansion of executive powers lost all credibility as I stood among a sea of people imploring an aspiring authoritarian to “Keep us safe!”

There is an unspoken social contract in democratic politics: Candidates should not overtly appeal to citizens’ basest instincts. As citizens in the world’s oldest constitutional democracy, we place a great deal of faith in the judgment of individuals, trusting that they would never willingly elect a tyrant to power. And thankfully, there are multiple, mediating institutions in our system of republican government to prevent a single individual or movement from assuming absolute control. But what if a totally unscrupulous demagogue—one with undeniable charisma and mass media appeal—comes along and decides that the unspoken social contract, like every other rule he has ever encountered, does not apply to him?

That is what Donald Trump has done: He has broken the social contract between the American people and their political leaders by banking on the assumption that unvarnished nativism, bigotry, and ignorance will win him the presidency.

Even worse, Trump has been rewarded by purportedly responsible and reasonable people, people whom I once respected and had to watch barking like seals as this madman and would-be tyrant brought them up to their feet again and again with his empty promises of salvific national recovery. When the delegates cheered him, did they think about the time he ridiculed John McCain for being “captured?” For me, like many others, that was the first moment I thought, “it’s over” for Trump. How many insults, stunning professions of ignorance, and outrageous revelations ago was that “gaffe”?

As they rose to hoot and holler, did the Republicans in Cleveland remember, even in the distant recesses of their minds, when he mocked a physically handicapped reporter? Did they recall the many loathsome remarks he made about women, or the praise he offered the Chinese communists for running their tanks over people in Tiananmen Square, or the encouragement he bestowed—just a day prior—upon Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruthless purge? The morning after accepting their nomination, when Trump—citing a supermarket tabloid—once again speculated that Ted Cruz’s father had been involved in the JFK assassination, did they reflect upon what enabling a plainly demented individual says about their patriotism? Did these latter-day Pontius Pilates, many of whom pridefully advertise themselves as adherents of Judeo-Christian faith, pause a moment to consider what their ancient texts say about the weak and the strong, the rich and the poor, about those who lust for power at the expense of everything else? I hope they did, and that they felt at least a pang of guilt at their participation in this moral obscenity masking itself as an exercise in American democracy.

James Kirchick, a fellow with the Foreign Policy Initiative, is a columnist at Tablet. He is a former writer at large for Radio Free Europe based in Prague and a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow based in Berlin. His Twitter feed is @jkirchick.

Britain voted to leave the EU by a slim margin – but not as slim as one would expect. The headlines are already blaring with words such as “surprising,” “shocking,”and “earthquake.”

Should we be surprised?

Only if we look at Britain without comparing it to its European neighbors.

Up until 2014, Britain was relatively free of the Neo-Nationalist parties that were gaining traction across the continent. It had its flirtation with right wing partiesbut they had virtually no electoral salience. But then the UK Independence Party (UKIP) led by Nigel Farage made Euroskepticism its calling card. It had support from movements such as Britain First which took up the anti-migration theme and left UKIP to speak mainly about Europe. In the spring 2015 European Parliamentary elections, UKIP was the leading party.

However, if we look comparatively across the continent, the results are less surprising. National referenda have not been kind to the EU.

In 2005, both France and the Netherlands voted to reject the proposed European constitution. Greecevoted in summer 2015 to reject a debt re-structuring plan proposed by the EU. In spring 2016, the Dutchvoted in a minor referendum against extending trade benefits to the Ukraine.

Citizens of European states do not like the EU. They have not been pro-Europe for at least the last 10 years — if ordinary citizens ever were.

British citizens were surely looking at their neighbors across the channel and not liking what they saw. Given this context, David Cameron’s decision to put membership in the EU to a popular vote was an extreme and foolish political miscalculation.

The ultimate cost may be the collapse of EU. Marine Le Pen, National Front leader in France has been calling for Frexit for a long time. Other countries may follow Britain’s lead.

Analysts argued that the Brexit campaign revealed a chasm between locals and cosmopolitans. They saw two Britains – a highly educated and mobilegroup and an older place-bound group left behind by globalization. Ironically, this vote will only reinforce that division in the UK and across Europe.

Terrence Guay, Pennsylvania State University:Britain’s summer of discontent reflects worst of times

The Brexit outcome is, to those who voted “remain,” a Shakespearean tragedy.

The UK’s relationship with the institution created by its European neighbors has long been fraught with seeds of discontent.Squabbles over payments to the EU’s budget, complaints by small businesses about regulations emanating from Brussels, oppositionto the expansion of policy-making beyond trade, worriesabout handling financial crises, and anger over immigration both from other member states and lands beyond finally delivered the result that the “leave” campaign sought .

While virtually every analyst expected a close outcome, the result is shocking financial markets and companies. Eventually the dust will settle, currency and stock markets will stabilize, and a “negotiated divorce” will take place over the next two years.

This will be an important time for U.S. companies to reassess their Europeanstrategy and operations. U.S. companies have $588 billion dollars invested in the UK. That represents 23 percent of U.S. corporate investment in the EU. Now the UK is likely to see its position diminish as a favored launching pad to enter theEuropean market. With trade barriers, mainly tariffs, likely to rise for products exported from the UK to the 27 other EU countries, the UK will be a less desirable location for U.S. firms.

Perhaps more important will be the disappearance of London’s voice in EU matters that are of concern to U.S. commercial and foreign policy interests.

London’s position on financial services regulations issues more closely match Washington’s than that of any other European country. These include the imposition of sanctions on Russia, relations with the Middle East, and the still-under-negotiation Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – which is now almost certainly dead as a result of the Brexit vote.

It is all but certain that the UK will be a less reliable ally to U.S. interests, not just in Europe, but globally. By the end of President Clinton’s or Trump’s second term in the White House, the phone number for 10 Downing St. will be further down on the president’s call list.

Peter Harris, Colorado State University: With Brexit, new challenges for U.S. grand strategy

U.S. grand strategy has just been dealt a double whammy.

Not only has America’s strongest ally in Europe just voted to relinquish its seat at the table in Brussels, but the new reality of Brexit means that decision-makers in Washington will now be having to fight fires in Europe instead of catering to more pressing geopolitical exigencies.

The U.S. has long depended on a united, strong, and vibrant Europe to help anchor the rules-based international order that it hopes will persist long into the 21st century. And since joining the European Economic Community in 1973, Britain has been an effective ally in the service of this goal, always a reliable proponent of an enlarged European Union organized around liberal economic principles.

Without London as an interlocutor, the U.S. will have to undertake the costly endeavor of shifting its diplomatic footprint from London to Berlin, Paris, or Brussels. How to push through the free trade deal between the U.S. and EU? How to make sure that Europe does not bend in the face of Russian predation? Britain is now far less able to help deliver on such issues.

Even more worrying from the U.S. perspective, however, is the possibility that more EU nations will begin to contemplate leaving the organization. This danger should not be underestimated: the EU has malcontents across the continent, and even pro-EU leaders can find themselves consenting to plebiscites against their better judgment. After all, David Cameron only pledged a referendum on Brexit in January 2013 as a gambit – ill-judged, it now seems – to placate restive Eurosceptics within his party.

All of this comes at an incredibly bad time for U.S. strategic planners, who are in the midst of an ambitious “pivot” to Asia that they see as critical to safeguarding the international security architecture of the Western Pacific and the wider world. For them, disunity in Europe is an unwanted, costly, and tragically unnecessary distraction.

Peter Harris is an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University. He recently published All Brexit is Local in National Interest magazine.

You’re going to be reading a lot of stories about the Brexit vote being a warning that Donald Trump can win. Those stories will be wrong.

Brexit apparently has won, and the primary reason is the economic turmoil wrought by the greed and at times open cruelty of British austerity, as imposed by David Cameron and George Osborne. Labour didn’t run against austerity in the last British election, and was punished for it. The British people were punished with more austerity. A brutal economy always feeds extremism, and that is how Britain got Brexit. The irony was that Cameron and Osborne had to fight desperately against the consequences of their own policies. And if you think I’m ignoring Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, that’s because he was almost invisible during the Remain campaign, and his support was tepid if not feigned. Britain has austerity and no credible national leaders. Hence Brexit.

While much of Europe was electing right wing governments that imposed austerity, the United States was electing Barack Obama. The Obama stimulus was a starkly different approach from European austerity. A larger stimulus would have done more to fuel a robust recovery, but the stimulus that was enacted stopped the economic free fall, and got the United States back on the right track. More needs to be done, and will be done, but the difference with Europe and particularly Britain is obvious. The extremism fueling the Trump campaign is neither as broad or deep as the extremism fueling Brexit. Because President Obama and Congressional Democrats ensured that the United States did not end up with the sort of brutal economic program the Republicans would have imposed, and that Cameron and Osborne in Britain did impose.

Simply put, the extremism fueling Brexit does not have the same resonance in the United States. Because our economy is not suffering the way Britain’s economy is suffering. And the economic agenda of Hillary Clinton is very deliberately designed to build on the success of the Obama economic agenda. The United States has alternatives that Britain did not have. And the United States will not follow Britain’s path into extremism because it hasn’t been on a parallel economic path.